Grunge gives way to gentrification in streets of Newtown

Adele Horin

FIRST came the DINKS - Double Income No Kids - then came the gays. And before you could say ''sea salt'', organic grocers, fusion food, and candle shops had arrived in Newtown.

As rents and housing prices skyrocketed, the university students in shared houses, and many of the Greek-Cypriot, Maltese and Aussie battlers moved out.

A new study on gentrification finds the Marrickville and Randwick local government areas and the Concord part of Canada Bay experienced the most rapid gentrification in the Sydney region in the decade to 2006.

Newtown, falling mainly in the Marrickville local government area, was a classic case of the shift in residents from labourers, factory workers, students and shopkeepers to lawyers, journalists and other professionals.

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The new study, for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, draws attention to the damaging consequences of gentrification for neighbourhoods, and for the people forced to move on.

''Those who had been evicted were often deeply angry at their enforced move,'' the report says. ''Those struggling to stay found themselves impoverished by hikes in their rents, but also feeling no longer at ease in [their] neighbourhoods.''

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The report, Gentrification and Displacement: The Household Impacts of Neighbourhood Change, is the first to quantify where gentrification has been most pronounced in Sydney and Melbourne. It examined which local government areas have experienced above-expected growth in managers and professionals, high-income households, high-income renters, and people with a bachelor degree or higher; as well as a decline, or less-than-expected growth, in low-income households and low-income private renters.

It found the most vulnerable groups - older single people, renters, and families with children - in gentrified areas such as Randwick had more than a 50 per cent chance of moving out than did similar households in other parts of Sydney.

Many of the displaced renters relocated to nearby suburbs in ''a somewhat desperate attempt to maintain a foothold near the locations they have come from,'' the study says. Those who bought homes were forced to the city fringes.

The researchers, led by an international expert, Rowland Atkinson, of the University of York, in Britain, include Maryann Wulff and Margaret Reynolds, from Monash University, and Angela Spinney, from Swinburne University of Technology.

Interviews with 30 people displaced by gentrification pressures revealed their ''significant sense of loss'' at being dislocated from communities in which they had lived for many years. Many said their landlords had sought massive rent increases, or significant increases at regular periods.

Some landlords had bought properties in a hot market and were under pressure. But even when landlords kept increases moderate, tenants felt unable to complain about repairs, and lived in fear of their luck running out.

The study found the people who helped gentrify an area could have ''a vested interest in seeing that the area continues to lose its diversity''.

For example, an application to Randwick council for an eight-unit social-housing block attracted 245 objections compared with two or three for a similar-sized private development.

Marrickville and Randwick councils have instituted affordable housing programs but state governments needed to take more action, the study says.

For a start, new powers were needed to allow tenants to challenge undue and super-inflationary rent increases.

With gentrification, ''it can seem as though neighbourhoods 'improve''' the report says. In reality the poor were forced into housing elsewhere.

Dr Wulff said: ''We're creating polarised cities and that can lead to a breakdown in understanding the needs and lifestyle of people different from you.''